Leaving around plaintext username and passwords in a script on a box isn't the best from a security standpoint. This change ensures the scheduled task wrapper script for WinRM doesn't leave these around on the box, and instead passes them to the script as arguments.
StopOnIdleEnd was set in the task definition for elevated/privileged
windows guest scripts. This setting:
> specifies that the task stops when the idle condition ceases to be true [1]
The "idle condition" is something that Windows periodically checks for,
and it's defined by a bunch of criteria like user presence/absence, CPU
/ IO idle time, etc. [2]
Telling our provisioner to stop the task if the "idle condition" ceases
to be true is a recipe for some sporadically stopped tasks, which seems
like precisely the behavior being reported in #5362.
I'm pretty sure this fixes#5362
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc248332.aspx
[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa383561%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Running Windows guest commands through a scheduled task were not returning the correct exit codes, they were only returning 1 or 0. This has negative consequences especially for Puppet which can return an exit code of 2 for partial success.
Since we're running an executable from inside a powershell encoded command we need to ensure we explicitly propagate the exit code to the original caller just like a regular PowerShell script - in this case cmd /c which in return is called from a scheduled task.
The logic used to read the file contents sometimes would leave lines behind unread. It now defaults to reading all lines and counts each line it has actually read.
This script creates an immediately run scheduled task using fresh credentials. This is a generic implementation used by the Chef provisioners. The script gets around several limitations in WinRM.
1. Credential hopping
2. The non-default Administrator account sometimes doesn't have true Administrator access when run through WinRM even with UAC disabled.
In short, this script allows commands to run through WinRM just as if they were run directly on the box.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Mitchell Hashimoto
Dan Dunckel
Marc Siegfriedt
Arlo Louis O'Keeffe
Shawn Neal
Paul Hinze